Linger

Mom’s knuckles were white, pressed into fists at her sides. “You’re acting like you didn’t do anything wrong.”

I felt deadly calm inside. It had been right to tell Sam not to come in; I wouldn’t have been able to be this resolute with him here. “I didn’t. I went to a studio in Duluth with my boyfriend, had dinner, and then came back home before midnight.”

“We told you not to,” Dad said. “That’s what makes it wrong. You’re grounded, and you went out anyway. I cannot believe how deeply you have betrayed our faith in you.”

“You are completely blowing this out of proportion!” I snapped. I expected my voice to sound louder than his, but it sounded thin in comparison; the second wind I’d gotten driving back with Sam was gone. I could feel my pulse in my stomach and throat, hot and sick, but I pushed through it and kept my voice steady. “I’m not doing drugs or failing school or getting any hidden body parts pierced.”

“How about—” He couldn’t even say it.

“Having sex?” Mom finished for him. “In our house? How about being amazingly disrespectful. We’ve given you room to roam and you have—”

Now I found the fuel to be loud. “Room to roam? You’ve given me a planet to myself! I have sat in this house alone for hundreds and hundreds of nights, waiting for you two to come home. I’ve answered the phone a million times to hear ‘Oh, we’ll be late, honey.’ I’ve arranged my own way home from school a thousand times. Room to roam. I finally have someone I’ve chosen for myself, and you guys can’t handle it. You—”

“You’re a teenager,” Dad said dismissively. As if I hadn’t just shouted. I would’ve doubted that I’d even raised my voice if my blood hadn’t been pounding in my ears, punishingly painful. He continued, “What do you know about a responsible relationship? He’s your first boyfriend. If you want us to believe you’re responsible, prove it. And that doesn’t involve underage sex and ignoring a direct order from your parents. Which is what you did.”

“I did,” I said. “I’m not sorry.”

Dad’s face turned red, the color rising from his collar to his hairline. In the light of the kitchen, it made him look very, very tanned. “How about this, then, Grace? You’re never seeing him again. Does that make you sorry?”

“Oh, come on,” I said. His words were starting to sound faraway and unimportant. I needed to sit down—lie down—sleep—something.

Dad’s words were nails in my temples. “No, you come on. I’m not fooling around here. I don’t like the person you are with him. He clearly doesn’t respect us as your parents. I’m not letting you ruin your life for him.”

I crossed my arms over my chest to hide that they were shaking. Part of me was in the kitchen having this conversation and part of me was thinking, What is wrong with me? My cheekbones pinched, warmed. I finally found my voice. “You can’t do that. You can’t keep me from seeing him.”

“Oh, I can,” Dad said. “You’re seventeen and living under my roof, and as long as both those things are true, I absolutely can. When you’re eighteen and out of high school, I can’t tell you what to do, but right now, the entire state of Minnesota is on my side.”

My stomach did something weird, a little twist, like nerves, at the same time that my forehead tingled. I put my finger to my nose, and it came away with a touch of red. I wouldn’t let them see it; put me on the spot even more. Grabbing a tissue from the table and pressing it to my nostrils, I said, “He’s not just a boy.”

Mom turned away, waving her hand in the air like she was just tired of the whole thing. “Right.”

At that moment, I hated her.

Dad said, “Well, for the next four months he is. You’re not seeing him again, as long as I have anything to say about it. We’re not doing more nights like this. And this conversation is over.”

I couldn’t stand to be in the same room as them a second longer. I couldn’t stand to see the way Mom was looking back over her shoulder at me, eyebrow lifted like she was waiting for my next move. And I couldn’t stand the pain.

I rushed to my room and slammed the door hard enough that I felt everything inside me shake.

CHAPTER FORTY

• GRACE •

“Dying is a wild night and a new road.”

I had words stuck in my head instead of a song. I couldn’t remember who wrote them, only that I had heard Sam read them out loud, looking up from the book and trying out the way they sounded. I remembered the moment, even: sitting in my dad’s old office here in the house, riffling through notes for an oral presentation while Sam slouched over a book. In the comfort of that room, icy rain sliding down the windows, spoken in Sam’s soft voice, the quote had seemed innocent. Clever, maybe.

Now, in the dark, empty silence of my room, the words running feverishly through my head again and again, they seemed terrifying.

The sickness inside me was impossible to ignore now. I waited a long time for my nose to stop bleeding, using toilet paper after I ran out of tissues. It seemed like it wouldn’t ever stop. My guts were twisted inside me, my skin boiling.

All I wanted was to know what was really wrong with me. How long it would take. What it would do to me at the end. If I knew all those things, if I had something concrete to hold on to instead of the pain, I could make my peace with it.

But I didn’t have any answers.

So I could not sleep. I could not move.

I kept my eyes closed. The space beside me where Sam was supposed to be seemed huge. Before all this, when I had him with me, I would just roll over and press my face into his back when I woke up in the night. Let his breathing lull me back to sleep. But Sam wasn’t here tonight, and sleep seemed far away and irrelevant with the crawling heat inside me.

In my head, I heard Dad forbidding me to see him again. My breathing caught a little at the memory. He’d change his mind. He couldn’t mean that. I pushed my thoughts onto something else. My red coffeepot. I didn’t know if such a thing actually existed, but if it did, I was buying one. Immediately. It seemed incredibly important to make it a goal. Get some money, buy a red coffeepot, move out. Find a new place to plug it in.

I flipped onto my back and laid my hand on my stomach, trying to see if I could actually feel the rolling of stomach under my fingers. I was so hot again, and my head felt weird and floaty, disconnected from the rest of me.